HYDERABAD: Heady with the landslide victory in the Lok Sabha elections, BJP is raring to inflict on TRS a death by thousand cuts. But the pink panthers, wary of its designs, are scripting strategies to retain their numero uno position. Telangana BJP leaders are exhausting their lung power in asserting that the future belongs to them. They go to the extent of saying that by 2023, the party will come to power in the State by dislodging the TRS. But the TRS remains unfazed. KCR keeps telling his leaders and cadres that they need not bother about the saffron party as they would soon tire themselves out sooner than later.
He had asked the leaders to make the party a 60-lakh member behemoth. According to him, the BJP will remain confined to fringes forever. He has, in fact, kicked off membership drive on June 27. With a personal accident insurance policy being offered as an add-on benefit, there is no dearth of people seeking to be part of the TRS. They will be engaged in the work till the last week of this month so that the party would be in fine fettle to face the elections to urban local bodies.
Though there is no threat to the TRS applecart at present, the saffron party leaders, are making menacing gestures, the latest being giving an impression that TRS Rajya Sabha member D Srinivas, who has fallen out with KCR, will soon be in their company.
His BJP-leader son Arvind has defeated KCR’s daughter Kavitha, in the Lok Sabha election from Nizamabad, thus setting the stage for his father to take the leap. As Srinivas will remain a persona-non-grata in the TRS, the BJP loves the situation. This is enough for party chief Amit Shah to get him on his side in a such a way that he would do his bidding while remaining technically a TRS RS member. When Shah was in Hyderabad, he was understood to have made it clear to party leaders that the TRS was BJP’s adversary.
While this is so, the TRS at the moment though appears to be ignoring BJP but it is wary of its designs. Earlier, in his first innings, KCR seems to have been on friendly terms with Prime Minister Narendra Modi albeit covertly but his public posturing was that he was against the BJP and also the Congress. He had even formed Federal Front to bring together the non-BJP and non- Congress parties together but it did not work out the way he had imagined.
Modi, who has emerged as a supernova in his second innings, apparently is distancing KCR since he does not need his support. This became evident when KCR’s name found no place in the high-power committee set up for transforming agriculture to raise farmers’ income with BJP as well as non-BJP chief ministers.
This came as a surprise since Modi, in the run-up to the Lok Sabha elections, had used Rythu Bandhu model for developing his Kisan Yojana. In return, KCR did not invite Modi for the inauguration of Kaleswaram Project. The TRS is keeping a watch on the activities of BJP since it might do a West Bengal in Telangana when the elections arrive.
There is always the possibility of the space that the Congress is vacating due to the machinations of the TRS might be grabbed by the BJP. In West Bengal, it was BJP and not TMC that had decimated CPM to emerge as a powerful force with its Hindutva slogan since TMC had, for a long time, been pampering the Muslims. The TRS is no different from the TMC. It also handles Muslims with kid gloves. Just as the way BJP’s Hindutva slogan worked in West Bengal, the same strategy might pay off in Telangana too.
Though there is no threat to the TRS applecart at present, Bharatiya Janata Party leaders, are making menacing gestures, the latest being giving an impression that TRS Rajya Sabha member D Srinivas, who has fallen out with KCR, will soon be in their company